Panegyric

“A friend gives you chocolate,” Tom told me once. Is that a friend for him? I thought to myself; it’d been a funny statement but not a smart one, you know. I thought that and was somehow disappointed. Then I learned. Albert was but a true human being, probably the best friend you could ever have.

Tom and Albert were not friends, or so he believed until that day. As I listened to the funeral panegyric given by Tom and see so many “friends” shed their tears for Albert, I wonder who would give me chocolate—at least once.

Back then those were difficult times in Venezuela. Our city was one of many in terrible conditions: little or no food, little or no water, little or no medicines, little or no people. The city was desolated, an arid land by the sea; only a few seabirds came to visit, I’d say by mistake, and left immediately. I remember my family and I got to eat one of those; it’s not an experience I want to remember after having written so many poems to honor the beauty and flight of the graceful feathered creatures.

Albert had a little girl; she got sick and everybody knew she wasn’t going to make it. Tom had a little girl, too, healthy enough though skinny and too weak to run like most kids, but she breathed well and had all her teeth and a head fully covered by hair.

It all had begun two weeks before when Emily, Tom’s little girl, said she wanted chocolate. It was something nobody had tasted in years. The girl did not even know the smell of it.